Submitter details
1. Submitter name
Individual or organisation name
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Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research
Consultation questions
1. Are there any other main drivers you think should be included?
Please explain your answer here
Another potentially significant driver is the increasing risk of ‘rapid at scale disruptors’ such as emerging contaminants or invasive microbes e.g. recent examples include Covid, M. Bovis, Foot & Mouth, Myrtle Rust, Kauri die-back etc. Such disruptors can occur at scale over a pretty short period of time – with the ‘at scale’ risk being continually enhanced through our widespread and increasingly intensive activities, as well as overall environmental degradation significantly affecting ecological resilience.
6. Do you have any final comments you would like to share about our draft briefing?
Add your comments, ideas, and feedback here.
The importance of monitoring is understated. Monitoring needs to be a cornerstone to stewardship, as well as informing and shaping any incremental or transformational change initiative. There are numerous examples of cumulative degradation that is not picked up early enough; or poor quality decision-making and investment due to the many holes in our environmental data; as well as our poorly informed ‘guestimates’ of future impacts and scenarios. A comprehensive and co-ordinated monitoring programme needs to cover different dimensions, e.g. inform how the environment is changing with time, how and where our activities are changing, and if our protection, restoration, or mitigation interventions are actually leading to the necessary improvement.
The concept of giving ecosystems ‘person status’, has considerably more potential to be recognised across a much wider number of ecosystems, and could be a powerful lever in changing our relationship with these ecosystems. This concept could be brought forward stronger in the document, e.g in chapter 3 a fifth main challenge could be recognised, phrased something like: ‘Empowering ecosystems to have the rights of personhood’. However, we recognise the appropriateness of such a widespread approach would have to be decided on an ecosystem-by-ecosystem case by hapu and iwi.
The concept of giving ecosystems ‘person status’, has considerably more potential to be recognised across a much wider number of ecosystems, and could be a powerful lever in changing our relationship with these ecosystems. This concept could be brought forward stronger in the document, e.g in chapter 3 a fifth main challenge could be recognised, phrased something like: ‘Empowering ecosystems to have the rights of personhood’. However, we recognise the appropriateness of such a widespread approach would have to be decided on an ecosystem-by-ecosystem case by hapu and iwi.